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Thursday, Jan 8, 2009
Kathleen's right: The very presence of a pet funeral home causes you to think -- if not about what you want to do for your pet when it dies then about animals and where they fit into our lives, and about the rituals we have around death and the ways we circumscribe love.
The Rottweiler was the biggest animal that has been brought to the funeral home so far -- 52 inches long, running the entire length of Kathleen's freezer. He was only 6 years old when he passed away. "His owner was in shock," Kathleen says. "She thought maybe he got depressed when her mother got sick and that killed him."
The smallest animal was a goldfish named Poppy. His owner wanted him cremated. "I tried to convince her just to bury it," Kathleen says. "I said, you're not going to get hardly anything back, if you get the flick of an ash -- and that's about what she got back -- but she wanted that. I gave her the urn because it was ridiculous not to. Firing up the cremator costs the same amount of money whether it's a cat or a goldfish."
Kathleen had a goldfish herself at one time, and though she was sorry to see it pass on, she couldn't grieve for the fish like she would a dog or a cat. "But you know what? Someone could say, 'How can you feel that for a cat?' I think it's about security and love. That goldfish? That was what she had to come home to at night."
When I ask Kathleen what's the most unusual request she's ever gotten in the pet funeral business, she says, "I don't find anything to be unusual. Everything is individual, so it's not unusual." For a moment she seems to regard me almost warily, but it's not the look of a wounded person; it's sharper, more measuring than that.
"Your customers seem to be mostly women," I say to her, and she says quickly, almost sternly, no, not really, it's women and men, gay and straight, young and old, we get them all.
She's cremated two pythons for two different customers. Cato and Bruno. Bruno's the one she remembers because he was beautiful and big,about 150 pounds. The owner was a bouncer in a Manhattan club. He told Kathleen that he had his apartment climatized for the snake. He opted for cremation and a Roman urn.
"Actually I was surprised I didn't hear from him afterward," Kathleen says, since the more grief-stricken clients often feel the need to stay in touch for a while and the bouncer was pretty shaken up.
"But he had his friends," she remembers. "They came with him. I mean, he didn't have a viewing or anything, but his friends all came with him when he brought the python in and when he picked up the cremains, they all came with him again. So he had a good support system there."
It's always easiest for Kathleen when the clients want to tell her everything about the pet, especially if they choose to have a wake. Then she can spend those two hours talking to them about their animal and not just coming in and out of the room, asking if they're all right and if they want some water.
"Most of my people will bring photo albums and share the pictures of their pets with me, tell me about the one funny incident, the one bad incident -- you know, talk about the guilt of how they feel when they yelled at him," she says. "And I'll take them through what I need to do at that point to help them get over those guilty feelings."
She sees no difference between the human and the pet funeral business -- mourning is mourning, she says.
"Right now, I have a man whose pet is still living. His wife passed away within the last few months. She's out in St. Charles cemetery and he said he wasn't prepared for her death, and now the dog he's had for 14 years is pretty much ... on her last leg and he wants to be prepared.
"He doesn't want the same thing to happen to him, you know -- the emotions -- as when his wife passed away," she continues. "He wants to be prepared, so I've been talking to him on the phone throughout this week, two, three days a week. He wants to bury [the dog] out at the cemetery, which is very close to St. Charles, so this way he could do two visits in one day."
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